Building e-commerce with OSCommerce

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

November 18, 2005 [7578 views]

My colleage Jarek Francik presented a step-by-step guide to setting up OScommerce using WAMP (windows+apache+mysql+php) on Friday. Here are some notes I wrote when I ran the similar session last year.

One of the challenges for this module is to find ways of building an online business without needed to create code. There is a considerable difference between a professionally developed highly integrated store and a bolt-on or experimental first-time online shop.

Advantages of lost cost ecommerce

• Allows inexpensive experimentation
• Allows development to be focussed on business and marketing
• Allows initial income to fund future development

Disadvantages

• Unsuitable for established brands (without considerable effort or white labelling)
• Hard to integrate with off-line business processes
• Hard to customise customer experience
• Tends to look like it has been created from a standard template
• May be harder to promote

Possible approaches

• eBay
• Amazon Marketplace
• Actinic or other “shop in a box” software
• OSCommerce
• Outsource to a professional development company

Factors to take into account

• Cost – what is the maximum budget that is available for construction and marketing?
• Hosting – do you want to host your own store or let someone else host it for you?
• Expected Return on Investment (ROI) – many “cookie cutter” stores generate very small amounts of revenue
• Technical skills – running Actinic or OSCommerce will still require at least a minimum understanding of the technology beneath

Signing up for Amazon Marketplace

1. Sell within the Amazon.co.uk environment
2. Benefit from existing traffic, promotions and brand value
3. Low cost starting point if you have only a few items to sell.
4. Ideal for collectables and second hand goods (like eBay).
5. Your products will appear alongside other Amazon sellers and regular Amazon items and will appear in search results
6. Amazon takes the orders, you are responsible for the shipping.
7. Take care to make sure that you fulfil orders promptly or Amazon will blacklist you.
8. Amazon charges £0.86 an order plus 17.25% of the order value plus a percentage of the postage fee charged

Experimenting with OSCommerce

1. Find a hosting agreement that allows installation and configuration of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) or WAMP (Windows+) components. To simply experiment install everything on your own PC.
2. Register a domain and point it at the hosting space you have rented.
3. Install Apache into the root of this hosting space and make sure that you can see it from outside.
4. Install MySql into a directory. Make sure that you set the permissions correctly as OSCommerce needs to be able to be a user of this database.
5. Install OSCommerce into its own directory following the instructions carefully.
6. Alter the apache configuration file to make PHP active
7. Run OSCommerce and launch the installer
8. Once set up the store is fairly easy to manage and seems quite powerful. Stock is added manually with explicit stock allocated to the store. A variety of different browsing methods is provided and pricing, shipping calculation, payment and special offers are all supported.
9. There are a variety of modules available to extend the software including PayPal and other payment partners.
10. This would be a good place to start an e-commerce project if you are planning on learning PHP as all of the source code is accessible and you can make any changes you want.

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